PositiveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)This entertaining book is rich with gems ... Duncan does not come across as a systematic thinker, and I don’t think I would ever ask him to prepare an index. His book is full of digressions – into alphabets, paper, page numbers, footnotes, dictionaries, reading, editing, collation, cartography, symbology – some of them necessary, some less so ... Nor is the book a comprehensive, sequential history of indexes. Duncan pays less attention than I expected, for example, to proto-index tables in illuminated manuscripts from the early Middle Ages. Nor is there much on index-like guides from non-European texts. Duncan has nothing to say at all about Henry Ashbee’s eroto-index masterpiece ... Duncan’s book is less a definitive history of indexes than a series of thematic essays – on imaginary indexes, indexes as puzzles, indexing as a vocation, indexes as revenge and much else besides. Though Duncan is not an index person, he shares with index people what turns out to be their chief anxiety: whether indexing is worthy labour and a worthy interest ... Readers wanting a history of the index might have expected something more linear, more ordered, more comprehensive, more … index-like. Fortunately, however, the criteria that define a good index are not the same as those that define an excellent book about indexes ... A book on systems authored by a non-systematic writer? Somehow it works. Duncan is not just an index-raker or second-hand critic, and his contribution is not mere Alphabetical Learning. An exemplar of contemporary scholarship, Index, a History of the will change how people think about indexes, and may well change how people think about books.
